Properties of Plastic Educator Guide

Exploratorium Staff Scientist Julie Yu changes and manipulates the physical and chemical properties of plastic bottles by exposing them to heat. This is how plastic bags and bottles can be recycled and used over and over again.

I have a plastic bottle on my desk.  It once contained the cola beverage I really should stop drinking.  I go through at least one of these each day, a habit cut down from a former 6-pack-a-day deluge.  I know the cola isn’t good for me, but now I’m thinking the plastic bottle is even worse.

I have something else on my desk: a pamphlet compiled by Peter Bryant of UC Irvine titled, “What’s Wrong with Plastic Water Bottles?”  Did you know that each year, “144 BILLION beverage containers end up in U.S. landfills, roads, streams and parks?”  Laid end-to-end, according to Bryant, those containers would “encircle the Earth 720 times, or reach to the Moon and back 38 times.”  In the United States, only 10 to 12% of plastic bottles are recycled.  That waste is truly astronomical.  And keep in mind that it takes at least 1000 years for those plastic bottles to break down in the landfill.

Most plastic bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.  That’s a petroleum product.  “4% of the world’s oil production is used as “feedstock” for plastic," according to Bryant, “and another 4% provides the energy to transform it into plastic.”  And of course then there’s the fuel needed to transport it to market.  San Francisco has some of the cleanest, freshest water in the world coming out of the taps. Yet it wouldn’t take you long to find someone walking down the street with a bottle of water that came from France or Fiji at 1000 times the price of the water coming from the kitchen faucet.  Why?

No doubt anthropologists of the future will be scratching their heads wondering why we paid for and wasted so much resources on something we already had pumped into our own homes.

And now due to our addiction to disposable plastic, something even more sinister is happening in the ocean.  In the middle of the Pacific is a circulating place known as the North Pacific Gyre. This vast area, reportedly twice the size of Texas, contains 6 times more plastic than plankton and is now more commonly called the Pacific Garbage Patch.  And this is a expanding environmental problem.  Plastic bags, bottles, buckets, rope, toys, trash and everything in between is making its way down rivers and streams, from storm drains and beaches, to the center of the ocean.

There are many reasons why we should kick the habit of disposable plastics.  But that probably isn’t going to happen soon.  So in the mean time we should get better at reusing and recycling.  As we showed in this QUEST Lab, plastic can be easily changed and modified to be used over and over again.  It’s incumbent upon us to make sure this resource isn’t just wasted, thrown away or worse, becomes more of an environmental hazard.

I’m looking at you, soda bottle on my desk.

Watch QUEST Lab – Properties of Plastic.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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Illustration of the Exploratorium's future home at Pier 15. (Credit: ZUM)

Reported for KQEDnews.org.

The Exploratorium, San Francisco’s popular hands-on science museum located at the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina district, is unveiling long-awaited plans for its future home at Piers 15 and 17 along the San Francisco waterfront, a quarter-mile northwest of the Ferry Building.

With a space that is bigger than four football fields, construction of a new, more modern and larger Exploratorium at the piers will be the largest project at San Francisco’s waterfront since the completion of AT&T Park in 2000.

“The relocation to Piers 15 and 17 on the Embarcadero has allowed the Exploratorium to dream big in a city that dreams big,” said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. “This is a model public-private partnership that will both revitalize crumbling piers and reinvent the Exploratorium experience.”

A groundbreaking ceremony and press conference was held in the connector building between the two piers on Tuesday morning. But instead of shovels digging into ground, the Exploratorium lowered a diver into the bay waters from a barge stationed behind the piers. As the crowd of guests, including groups of school children, looked on from behind barricades a few yards from the end of the pier, the Green Street Band from San Francisco launched into old-time jazz staples such as “Tiger Rag”, “Wabash Blues” and a version of “You Are My Sunshine.”

The diver emerged a few minutes later, hoisted from a crane, standing inside and holding onto a black metal hoop. The hoop was then given to Dennis Bartels, Exploratorium’s Executive Director, and George Cogan, chairman of the museum’s board of directors. They climbed two ladders and placed the “O”-shaped hoop between the remaining letters of the museum’s name which was written on the white wall of the building facing onto the Bay.

Exploratorium diver emerges from the Bay, holding onto a hoop.(Credit: Sheraz Sadiq)

Officials from the Exploratorium, David Chiu of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Rodney Fong of the San Francisco Port Commission spoke afterward about the significance of the Exploratorium’s relocation to the waterfront, as well as the economic boon for San Francisco with the creation of 900 new jobs during construction of the project over the next two years.

“We finally get to play outdoors. Instead of shrinking nature down to fit onto a tabletop, which we’ve done for so many years, we get to now go play with Mother Nature itself, which is really fabulous,” said Bartels.

The cost for the new museum – which is scheduled to open in 2013 – and the rehabilitation of Pier 15, which marks the first phase of the project, is estimated at $220 million. Construction of the new museum will first require the seismic upgrading and renovation of Piers 15 and 17, which were built respectively in 1931 and 1912.

From Left to Right, Rodney Fong (SF Port Commission), George Cogan (Exploratorium), Dennis Bartels (Exploratorium), Monique Moyer (SF Port Commission). (Credit: Sheraz Sadiq)

At the groundbreaking event, the Exploratorium officially launched its $300 million capital fundraising campaign, with $209 million raised thus far. In March, the museum announced it received two anonymous donations from Bay Area high-tech leaders totaling $90 million, provided that they raise an additional $40 million from other sources. The donations are the largest the museum has received since its founding in 1969.

The project received a permit in March from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission which required the museum to mitigate for the environmental impact of the new construction and the dredging and hauling of nearly 75,000 cubic yards of mud from the Bay, which has already begun.

“The San Francisco waterfront is easy to get to and it has all around it the natural beauty and everything that the Exploratorium is all about. So it adds to the excitement,” said Will Travis, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, known as BCDC. “It will take what is now a treasure in the region and make it an international phenomenon.”

For years, the museum has looked at alternative sites to accommodate the more than 500,000 visitors who annually pass through its doors and to boost its renowned professional development workshops for science educators. The Exploratorium’s new campus at the piers will be the length of a New York City block and nearly five times larger than its current space. Its managers also expect a doubling in the museum’s attendance, given the proximity to public transit at the waterfront.

The project represents another major boost for fans of Bay Area science and environmental education, coming two years after completion of the new California Academy of Sciences museum in Golden Gate Park, which opened in September 2008.

The San Francisco real estate investment and development firm, Wilson Meany Sullivan, which played a key part in the redevelopment of the Embarcadero Ferry Building, has been hired by the Exploratorium to oversee development of the new museum, which Dennis Bartels, the Exploratorium’s Executive Director, claimed would be “the first neutral energy museum in the world.”

Exploratorium Executive Director Dennis Bartels. (Credit: Sheraz Sadiq)

“The building has a long roofline and because of that we can generate 1.4 megawatts of solar power with today’s technology, and we’re putting in other sustainability measures. The constant temperature of the Bay can actually be set up to a heat exchanger so that we can get both heat and cooling right out of the water through a radiant floor system,” said Bartels.

The new space will boast a 32-foot observatory with a rooftop “Outdoor Learning Center”, indoor and outdoor exhibits, a courtyard, a tidal pool, a restaurant and café, as well as a “Bayside History Walk” at each of the two piers which will feature interpretive exhibits of San Francisco’s maritime history. An asphalt parking lot between the two piers will be removed, exposing the waters of the Bay below, traversed via two pedestrian bridges.

llustration of the exposed Bay between Piers 15 and 17 with connecting pedestrian bridges. (Credit: ZUM)

According to Travis, BCDC’s executive director, the agency was impressed with the more than two acres of public access that will be created by the Exploratorium at Piers 15 and 17.

The design plans call for outdoor public access along all sides of the new museum and nearly 800 square feet of indoor public access on the second floor of the new observatory building.

“Because it's inside, it will be open at all times during the year and nobody has every done this before,” Travis said. “It’s like taking an executive's office, the most valuable part of the project, and dedicating it to the public. That's way cool.”

The Exploratorium was the brainchild of Frank Oppenheimer, a physicist and the younger sibling of atomic bomb developer Robert Oppenheimer. The museum encourages adults and children to play with its nearly 500 on-site exhibits, artworks and displays, fostering an environment where fun is a prerequisite to learning about science, whether it’s DNA or the Doppler Effect.

“The Exploratorium helps educate a science literate society. And we need that,” said Sue Pritchard, a former head of the California Science Teachers Association who teaches middle school students at a public school in Orange County.

Oppenheimer served as the museum’s director from its opening in 1969 to his death in 1985. He also designed many of the museum’s exhibits, including one located roughly 100 feet from the front door which features rubber balls that start bouncing in a transparent chamber when a dial is turned by museum patrons.

“This is an exhibit that can entrance a four-year-old or a physics professor,” said Paul Doherty, co-director of the Teacher Institute at the Exploratorium. “It teaches that when a gas gets hotter, the molecules of the gas move more quickly, on average. And some of the molecules move really fast and some of the molecules move slowly.”

Since 1984, the Exploratorium has offered training to science teachers from around the world through its National Science Foundation-supported Teacher Institute. One hundred teachers are accepted to participate in its summer program, where for one month, six hours a day, five days a week, teachers learn how to build scaled-down versions of Exploratorium exhibits they can use in their classrooms. In 2009, the institute offered a toy workshop to teachers, showing them, for example, how to build tugboats of aluminum baking pans to help foster classroom discussions about force and motion.

“This is the power of the Exploratorium. It gets the students' minds thinking. Thinking, sharing and doing,” said Pritchard, who has attended the Exploratorium’s Summer Institute six times since 1998.

“It caused me to totally change how I teach science,” she added. “I realize textbooks have their place but there’s so much more to teaching science. And when you have no money coming in to support science, you appreciate knowing the inexpensive ways to enlighten the students and to bring to the classroom this excitement and passion for science.”

Crowd behind Piers 15 and 17 at the groundbreaking event for the new Exploratorium. (Credit: Sheraz Sadiq)

For Doherty, the Exploratorium’s move to the waterfront piers marks an exciting period of growth for the Teacher Institute, which currently must turn away two out of every three applicants for lack of space.

“We may now be able to accommodate 120 teachers during the summer and maybe see a 30 percent increase in our physical space for the Teacher Institute,” he said. “In the new Exploratorium, we’ll be doubling the number of classrooms and there will be entirely new programs that use those classrooms.”

Since 2004, the Exploratorium has been working with the Port of San Francisco to negotiate a 66-year lease and development agreement for its use of 136,000 square feet at Pier 15 and 110,000 square feet at Pier 17.

In 2005, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution that exempted the museum’s lease of the piers from San Francisco’s competitive bidding process because of its “uniqueness as a special cultural and educational opportunity for the people of the City and County of San Francisco.” Supervisors approved the project last November.

When asked what founder Frank Oppenheimer would think about the Exploratorium’s future home, Bartels said, “He would be so proud. He was the one who said that the Exploratorium is never finished. So he believed it was always an act of creation, always a process of changing itself and trying on new things and always experimenting. And to have this kind of site to do our experiments, just to see the excitement in our staff, to see that would have made him grin from ear to ear.”

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What to do when all your friends are at Burning Man? Here are six fun activities to inspire the Maker in you.

You may have noticed a few strange occurrences this week: rush hour seems lighter, there are no lines at the grocery store and you can suddenly find parking in San Francisco. As many of us know, this is the week of Burning Man.  The city has cleared out and headed to Black Rock Desert in Nevada to show off their creativity, display feats of engineering and adorn themselves in furry costumes.

There’s no time like this week to take advantage of these activities to fuel your senses and inspire the Maker in you:

1. Visit Burning Man art in the city: Both the Raygun Gothic Rocketship at the Embarcadero and Ecstacy in Hayes Valley were unveiled at Burning Man in years past. They are amazing feats of engineering, art and ingenuity and definitely worth a visit.

2. Take a class at Tech Shop. They are a great resource our us DIYers in the Bay Area. They offer over 20 classes a week in everything from laser cutting, sewing, electronics and CNC mills. Their current space is in Menlo Park and a second location will be opening in the heart of San Francisco soon.

3. Go to the Exploratorium! One of the most fun creative spaces for engineers and DIY freaks, I could spend hours getting lost in their exhibits. Best of all, It’s free tomorrow night.

4. Visit a science cafe. The East Bay Science Cafe is meeting tomorrow to talk particle physics with Dr. Beate Heinemann who will be discussing the Large Hadron Collider.

5. Take a walk in the wild with Forage SF. Learn about all the edibles growing in our back yard on this East Bay walk on September 4th. Future walks take black on both sides of the bridge, but they sell out quickly!

6. Go to Balsa Man. On Saturday evening, the same night that “the Man” will burn in Black Rock City, tiny pieces of art made out of balsa wood will be burnt off the San Francisco coast in what is akin to a much tinier and shorter Burning Man like event.

With so much cool stuff going on, this is a great week to be in town. Enjoy!

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Every Thursday, the California Academy of Sciences is transformed into a lively venue filled with music, provocative science, mingling, and cocktails for visitors 21 and older. Activities and performers change week to week. Image courtesy Jenny Oh.

Over lunch today, I got into a debate with my friend over which camp I fell into – nerd or geek. His understanding is I lacked the technical aptitude to fall into either category. Of course, I disagreed. I am quite confident that I am situated comfortably in the nerd camp. His rebuttal was that I throw parties for a living of which I countered that I throw “science” parties.

So at an impasse, definitions were in order – both are quoted form the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Nerd
Function: noun
Etymology: perhaps from nerd, a creature in the children's book If I Ran the Zoo (1950) by Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
An unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person; especially one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits

Geek
Function: noun
Etymology: probably from English dial. geek, geck fool, from Low German geck, from Middle Low German
1: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake
2: a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked
3: an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity

“Slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits” definitely rings a bell. I love researching and I always have. In high school, the librarians knew me by name because I spent more time with books than peers. In college, I would pick paper topics specifically to gain access to the Bancroft rare books library at Cal. In school, it was easy to fuel my nerdy interests and get lost into a battle of wits amongst friends but in adulthood, I have had to search for like-minded people and events. Below is my list of favorites intellectual haunts in the city.

NightLife at California Academy of Sciences

Okay, I am totally biased as I manage the music and programming for the series. But I don’t think I would have explored so many other events if I wasn’t working on creating a “science” party of my own.

Down to a Science Informal Lectures at Atlas Café

This past Monday, I heard Brian Fisher talk about ants at this series. His stories, passion, and enthusiasm filled the room and the audience was captivated. Not only did we see into the fascinating world of ants but we found out why Dr. Fisher screens his calls. His number one question from the public is ‘How do I get rid of the ants in my kitchen?’

Down to a Science Book Club at Book Inc.

In January, we are reading Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice for all Creation which is one of my all-time favorite science books. In the past month, I was introduced to the amazing medical mystery of Prions. The discussion has been small and incredibly lively each time I’ve attended.

Exploratorium after Dark

Okay, I have to admit that I haven’t been to this particular event yet because I work on NightLife on Thursday nights. But I have a group assembled to go check it out during our hiatus in December. I love that they are doing a night like this as I HEART the Exploratorium. I have ever since I visited during bubble day and was able to step into a giant bubble thanks to a lot of bubble solution and a simple pulley system.

LoveTech usually held at Il Pirata

I attended LearnTech which is a part of this series to support my friend who built a navigation portal into fractals. This is a great event that plays with the intersection between art, electronics and music. LearnTech was set up as mini talks and tabling. The talks, interaction, and boundless creativity had me captivated.

Ask a Scientist Informal Lectures held at Axis Café

This is another informal Science Café that has great content. The last one I was able to attend delved into the science behind magic. Even thought the place was packed, the lecture and discussion were lively and funny to boot.

Bookswap held at Booksmith

Reading, being my portal into nerdiness, is a constant pastime. But there are very few times that I get to truly discuss a book let alone several. I brought Mary Roach’s Bonk and swapped it for a Ninja novel. I was also given the recommendation of World War Z. I read it in two days; itt was so well written and absolutely engrossing.

What’s wonderful about San Francisco is this is only a slice of science events in the city. Have you found a haunt in the San Francisco Science Scene? Feel free to share you’re favorites in the comment section below.

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The Exploratorium turns 40!

The Exploratorium opened quietly that fall, slowly changing the way science museums are organized and oriented to their audiences. It combined a living laboratory, art, and interaction under one roof; the result is a place where science is accessible and owned by all.

In celebration of this anniversary, the Exploratorium is hosting a number of events at the museum over this weekend. Plus they are throwing in quite a treat…admission is free all weekend (November 7-8). For a full list of activities and an exceptional history of the museum, check out the Exploratorium’s 40^th anniversary website.

Exploratorium After Dark: Electrifying Science with Dr. MegaVolt
When: Thursday 11/5, 6-10 PM
Cost: Free for members, $14 for non-members (Adults 21+ only)
Details: Blow your mind with the electrifying science of Tesla coils and Austin Richards, PhD—aka Dr. MegaVolt. This electrifying Exploratorium Science After Dark will feature Dr. MegaVolt jousting with 14-foot electrical arcs from his high voltage Tesla Coil.

Cutting Ice into One with a Motorcycle
When: Saturday 11/7
Cost: Free
Details: Imagine a big block of ice suspended from the ceiling of the Exploratorium. Now imagine a wire wrapped around the middle of that ice block from which is hung a motorcycle. Chill out with other skeptics and watch the motorcycle fall to the floor as the wire very slowly cuts through the ice, but bear witness—the ice block remains one whole piece!

Iron Science Teacher
When: Sunday 11/8, 2-3 PM
Cost: Free
Details: Cheer on the competitors in this zany science cook-off, where teachers compete before a live audience for the revered title, 'Iron Science Teacher.' In recognition of the Exploratorium’s 40th birthday, this special edition of our popular show features a secret ingredient closely related to birthdays!

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up – A Conversation with Author K.C. Cole
When: Sunday, 11/15 at 3 p.m
Cost: Free with admission to the museum
Details: Discover the never-before-told story of Frank Oppenheimer, physicist, educator, brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and founder of the Exploratorium. Believing that “without understanding, we’d all be sunk,” Frank Oppenheimer created the Exploratorium to be a museum of human awareness that combined art and science while encouraging play, experimentation, and a sense of joy and wonder.

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